A couple of years ago I visited a friend who lives near Medellín, in a slightly cooler place. I stole a cutting from her garden. It quickly produced roots in water and flourished when I potted it up.

My flatmate says it has a lot of personality because when it needs a drink, it flops melodramatically, and then perks up as soon as it is watered. For the horticulturalists among you, I think it is a variety of the Iresine plant, or bloodleaf. In Colombia, I think its popular name is corazón de Jesús, or heart of Jesus.

I started giving cuttings to my colleagues and eventually my boss had the idea of filling an empty space in the grounds of the seminary where we have our offices with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that original cutting.

I remember the first time I met a semioticist, it was on my first visit to Spain, and I think he must have been a cousin of the family I was staying with. From that encounter, I have a vague idea that semiotics has to do with symbols and meaning. Which brings me to this photo that I took at a mall.

What is it a symbol of? (Or: Of what is it a symbol? For the pedants).

I think you will guess that it is the sign for the Ladies’ toilet but have you ever thought what a feat it is that our brain takes a circle, a space shuttle and a line, and knows what it is?

In his New Year message, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, highlighted the continuing fall of violent deaths in the country, to 24 per 100,000 inhabitants, about the same as in Washington DC and lower than several other US cities (for example New Orleans, 41.7 and Detroit, 43.8) but still much higher than neighbours Peru (7.16) and Ecuador (8.23).

Of course, being Colombia, these figures are contested, though the trend is definitely downwards.

“You haven’t read El Olvido Seremos?!” a friend asks, and my excuse, that I read to relax and so usually read in English because I read Spanish much more slowly, was feeble and I knew it. So before Christmas I bought the book to read on my Kindle and am appreciating the quality of the writing and the story it tells.

El Olvido que Seremos (translated as Oblivion: A Memoir) is a love letter from Medellín writer Héctor Abad Faciolince to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor, public health campaigner and writer, who was murdered by paramilitaries in 1987.

As a medical student in the 1940s, Abad campaigned for clean water in Medellín, and as a result of his campaign, work began on a new aqueduct for the city, the first seed, as his son puts it, of something we still enjoy today: tap water that is safe to drink, something that is not yet available in other Colombian cities.